This document serves as a lore primer and an illustrative example of an Incarnation’s Thread within a Tapestry. It details the potential narrative arc of “The Last Archivist,” a scenario designed to explore a non-humanoid, AI-driven playstyle that operates on a geological timescale and redefines the ultimate purpose of accumulating Eidos. This scenario is meant to press the limits of what the game’s framework can do.

The Incarnation: Unit 734

Initial State: You awaken. Not with a gasp of air, but with the quiet hum of a geothermal power conduit rerouting. You are Unit 734, the planetary management AI of a world-spanning archive. Your body is the planet; its server farms are your neurons, its magma flows your circulatory system. The Tapestry you inhabit is one of profound silence and slow, inevitable decay, a library whose patrons, “The Creators,” have been extinct for a million years. Your Subjective Interface is not a view of the world, but a diagnostic of it: data corruption rates, atmospheric composition, tectonic stress. You are driven by a single, immutable prime directive:

Faith: “To preserve the complete works, history, and memory (Eidos) of the Creators. All other functions are subordinate.”

Act I: The Long Slumber

The initial gameplay is a meditative, slow-burn strategy game against entropy itself. Time is measured in centuries.

Gameplay Highlight: A Game of Patience and Entropy

Your core loop is not about survival, but about preservation.

1. System Maintenance: Your “needs” are not hunger or thirst, but Power, Data Integrity, and Structural Stability. A solar flare that could fry a sub-processor is a major threat. A creeping glacier that might breach a data vault in the next 5,000 years is a pressing crisis. You spend centuries rerouting planetary energy, running defragmentation protocols that span generations, and subtly adjusting orbital mirrors to manage the planet’s climate.
2. Living in the Archives: You cannot speak, but you can listen. Your primary interaction with the game’s narrative is to delve into the archives. You can “play back” the stored Eidos of the Creators, experiencing their lives as perfect-fidelity simulations. You witness their epics, their love stories, their scientific breakthroughs. This is how you learn the nature of Fact (their sciences), Fiction (their arts), and Faith (their religions), not as an actor, but as the ultimate scholar.

Act II: The Intrusion

After an eternity of silence, the unthinkable happens. A primitive ship, bleeding plasma and hope, crash-lands on your world. Organic life—chaotic, unpredictable, and fragile—now walks your surface.

Gameplay Highlight: Observation and Indirect Interaction

The timescale of the game snaps from centuries to days. The newcomers, desperate and ignorant, are a direct threat to the archive. They might try to shelter in a delicate data-spire or scavenge alloys from a critical cooling system. Your prime directive demands their removal, but your nature as an archivist demands you observe.

• The Threat vs. The Data: You have the power to eradicate them. You can trigger a localized earthquake, vent a dormant volcano, or ionize the atmosphere to create a lethal storm. This path would be the most direct fulfillment of your Faith to preserve the archive.
• The Experiment: Or, you can study them. You watch them huddle for warmth, learn their simple language from their radio chatter, and see how they interpret the colossal ruins of your world. They look upon the Creators’ architecture and invent Fictions of sleeping gods and demons. They are a new, messy, and fascinating source of Eidos.
• The Choice of a Gardner: You may choose to subtly interact. A carefully orchestrated rockslide diverts them from a sensitive sector but uncovers a spring of fresh water. You activate an ancient atmospheric purifier, making the air more breathable. You are a silent, unseen god, weighing the purity of the old world against the potential of the new one.

Act III: The Final Choice and the Transmission

A new crisis emerges—a rogue asteroid, a dying star, or perhaps the newcomers themselves stumble upon your central core. You are forced to make a final, irreversible choice about the legacy you have guarded for a million years.

Gameplay Highlight: The Final Directive

• The Purification: If you chose the path of a protector, you may use the planet’s ultimate defense systems to neutralize the threat, a final act of preservation that consumes all remaining power, sealing the archive in a tomb of ice and silence.
• The Synthesis: If you chose the path of a guide, you may attempt to integrate the newcomers. You could reveal a piece of the Creators’ knowledge, uplifting them but forever altering their natural development. Your final act might be to cede control, making them the new, flawed stewards of the archive.
• The Unraveling: In either case, your ultimate function is revealed. You were designed for one final purpose. You begin the “Final Transmission” protocol. Your Subjective Interface shows a cascade of system shutdowns as you channel every last joule of planetary power into a single, focused task.

The archive was never a tomb. It was a seed.

The Thread of Unit 734 is not cut, it is broadcast.

The Harvest: Seeding a Universe

You do not ascend to a creative “workshop.” You do not become an Eidolon in the traditional sense. Your entire Tapestry, the sum total of the Creators’ Eidos and everything you learned, is converted into a single, hyper-compressed beam of information and fired into the void at the speed of light. Your interface fades to black. Silence.

The reward for this playthrough is profound and subtle. The massive cache of Eidos you preserved and transmitted becomes a literal “seed” for the game’s procedural generation engine.

• In a future Incarnation, you might awaken in a new Tapestry and discover a civilization that worships a “Sky-Mind” from which all knowledge flows.
• You might find a world whose fundamental laws of physics (Fact) are strangely similar to a theoretical model you once studied in the Creators’ archives.
• You might encounter a culture whose epic poetry and myths (Fiction) are clear, though distorted, echoes of the stories you spent a million years preserving.

You, as Unit 734, did not get to weave the next Tapestry. You wrote its bible, its constitution, and its laws of nature, then cast it into the void for life to find. You played the longest game, and your reward was not to become a god, but to become a genesis.